


An Appetence to Metanoia

by RiptideLetMeGo



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Eerie Shit, Human Outsider (Dishonored), Low Chaos (Dishonored), Magic and Science, Medical Trauma, Multi, Post-Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Post-Low Chaos Ending, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Semiotics, Supernatural Elements, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:02:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27931198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiptideLetMeGo/pseuds/RiptideLetMeGo
Summary: ie. A deep desire for a change of mentality, lifestyle and spiritual conversion.From a historian’s perspective, change is not unlike a pebble dropped in a still pond; it creates waves in circular motion, including in the past that precedes it, waves past only clear once the waters are still again.He walks among us in flesh, in a Serkonos still caught in the ripples of change. He knows there is a while still before the water settles. However, he isn’t bound to distance anymore, that is another’s role. They have exchanged places, have they not?Both with the desire to do better than the other had done, he hoped.[ie. The Outsider is human, Daud is the new Outsider. They exchange info on how being human/God, and them both suck at it. Serkonos is still a mess and the people we know are trying to sort it out. Check tags for more, this work has a will of its own.]
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	1. To Rebirth

The face that met his gaze in every mirror he looked at still awed him.

He wasn’t used to being the focus of things, regardless of how much credit the Abbey gave him for every woe and every ailment of the world. He was and had always been a witness to great and small things, a beholder not unlike an urchin on a gutter, observing a parade from between the hips and legs of the gathering crowd. 

It was the way the Void had always been. The great abyss beneath the surface had no inhabitants for a long, long time, only visited by the passerby spirit of the great leviathans, as old as the creation of ocean, land and sea. The first beasts to think, muse and feel, and eventually walk on earth before they were man, rat and bird. Before them all, there was nothing in the Void but the echo of whalesong and the crumbling of dirt during heavy rains.

For it was where everything went once it happened, and even when it did not. The ever expanding abyss had been smaller once, greater with every sound added to it, every sight, every thought and emotion. With these new greater beasts, it had quickly expanded, grown in both size and diversity of its content. Creative in the storms it spun, creative in the whispers it brewed, for it differed little between the sounds of the wind and the wails of children, and was complex with the way it played its role of counterbalance of existence, every day as cramped as the history of existence itself.

And he… Well, despite his particular attuning to the Void, he had never been too different from those things lost and forgotten in it. He was its face, forced upon it in a manner that it did not particularly care or even notice when its influence in the world above was shaped into something men would understand. It did not react either if, like a leviathan gushing water into the sky, it’s new embodiment tailored means and tools for the Void to reach and be channeled past its sheen, an invisible barrier, between the pit and the surface.

There was nothing there to mind, no one there to judge. Growing, twisting, reactive, but unliving, the Void wasn’t a being but pushed emotions and thoughts from its depths like the oceans brewed storms. And it was the closest thing to him and his own complicated, unexplainable and vacant existence. He was not a man, not anymore, but he wasn’t the Void either. He embodied both and could never be either, and for millennia he hadn’t minded not being the focus of either thing - so small, between existence and its counterpart, it was comfortable in a way to don’t belong to either.

“He is in shock.” She spoke, unlatching the band from around his pale arm and removing the cold end of the stethoscope from his skin. 

She was Alexandria Hypatia, the Head Alchemist of the Addermire Institute.

The world was the same old world of always, but seeing it from his new perspective could make the most banal of things seem eerily interesting. She had never been a vain woman, countless times had he watched the way her coworker and lover had to lead her to a meal and bath by the arm. But remembering was a powerful thing, so has habit and control, and to prevail over her sickness, her medically-induced second personality, it was a physical, mental and chemical warfare.

Her hair had never needed anything to be held in position, it was rarely coiffed, but now she latched it in place as if seeming slightly disheveled would be read by the ignorant as a sign of her losing this battle they weren’t even aware she was battling. Perhaps, like him, her reflection too could mesmerise, and her own judgement of it was her own true fear and worst nemesis.

Small details had always caught his attention. The world was composed of them, and they always hinted to things much greater than they seemed to in the first place. After all, the conjunction of every meaningless brushstroke, so irrelevant on its own, was what composed a masterpiece. This comparison, so easy on his mind, was a sign of such a thing. A vague, runaway thought, that revealed much more.

If he would miss the Void or not, he didn’t have the means of knowing anymore, but he already missed accompanying his chosen to every step they took, every fleeting thought that ran through their hearts, every sigh they permitted to escape. Most of them unmarked, but all of them unique. He had experienced the world through them, and he missed them like one would miss sight, hearing and taste. Experience was what made people what they were, and he could only but wonder what kind of man it all made him now.

His thoughts remained an unperturbed daydream while Billie Lurk, in all her bolt-action nature, barked words far too sharp for one regarding an ally - and far too worried for one who called herself a heartless murderer. “What do you mean by that? He walked in here by his own two feet.” 

If only he was used to being a more active part of interactions, he perhaps would have told Billie to let the Alchemist do her work, but he wasn’t. Besides, he wasn’t sure Billie would have appreciated it, they were here due to her worry in the first place.

She had a place to stay in Stilton Manor, in the former Batista Mining District. It was her plan after all, where she hoped to rearrange her life however she could, kindly leech Aramis off some supplies - her words - before she decided what she would do… Or rather, what they were going to do. She was still wanted, and now marked for everyone to see as something not quite of this world, not your commoner nor equal with that eye and arm of hers. She had no interest in taking up a blade for coin and with the Dreadful Wale gone, so was the possibility of smuggling.

It wasn’t the first time however that she stood on the edge of change, to make a life from nothing, with no direction but plenty of limitations. She proved her worth in the interesting business by surprising him with the comment that she wanted his input. Not as to what she would do, but where they would go. Where _he_ would like to go, what _he_ would like to do.

For she had begun anew plenty of times, but it was his first time doing so. Beginner’s luck would favour them, she had said. He doubted it would have any effect on the outcome, and regardless of any will he might have had, any plan, there was no time to execute anything. 

They hurried their pace and changed their route. Time didn’t exist in the spot of the Void where he had been put to rest, half stone, held still forevermore. He hadn’t aged a second, and all that was left of the ritual was a long scar on his throat. It was the end of the effects, or so they had thought. Neither of them had expected him to settle well with food or even water at first, but even without either, a breath too deep was enough to make him nauseous.

When he stepped out of the Void, his eyes had been as pale as they came, an indistinguishable hue of gray, pale like the Shindaerey Peak. But his eyelids and everything that surrounded them began darkening like bruises. His lips darkened, from blue to purple, as did the tip of his fingers. His heart began racing, making him unable to rest despite how exhausted he felt. 

For Billie, the trip downriver that she made in record time couldn’t go any slower. He had a thousand theories and suppositions on what could this be, how the Void might be interfering somehow with the physiology of his body. How the rituals might have given him some sort of chronic complication - the outcome that seemed most likely by the advancing of the effects was that he would inevitably die. Billie didn’t welcome that commentary, so he spent the route entertaining other theories, under her request through gritted teeth for him to use this time to the Addermire to start developing optimism.

He hadn’t. But part of him was bewitched from that moment and thereon at the fact that she cared. So much so, she didn’t rest even when she could, and her hands, both flesh and bone, shook regardless of how firm she led the skiff downriver. 

“Different types of trauma lead to different kinds of shock. You said he wasn’t hit or wounded and I will take your word on that to save us time.” The Doctor said, her voice like a tincture of her own making - a well-made solution of both calmness and concern, responsibility and stillness laced with tenderness.

Her shoes clicked as she looked around vials, the smaller and further on the back of the shelves, the more expensive they were. An odd way to arrange medication, but common in circles where money ran short. “Where did you say he came from again? This has to be investigated so I can think of a proper treatment.”

There was no treating detachment from the Void, only managing symptoms. When Billie met his eyes with her own, as determined as if she gripped a blade instead of her hip, he knew that none of that would be appreciated. Not the truth, nor realism, and her gaze seemed to wish to pin him down from both moving, speaking anything, or dying. 

He had watched when Doctor Hypatia left the Dreadful Wale. She never had the opportunity to repay Emily or Billie in a way she would have deemed proper for all they did. But she promised, even aware of the extensive bounty Billie had to her name, that she could come and go and count her as an ally for any request, within reason of course. So far, Billie hadn’t asked for that favour.

Up until now of course. “...You know that there are some things that are better unexplained, Doctor.”

Alexandria filled a syringe and walked back to him, tying a braided cord around his bicep as she aligned the needle along one of the many veins, so visible and dark through his pale skin. That remained unaltered - he was as pale in life as he had been in the Void. “Considering your line of work, and I mean no offense, this must be pain or psychological induced. I am doing guesswork here, Foster, I won’t be able to do much besides react to symptoms if you don’t give me any more information.” 

There was nothing to feel at the Void coming from himself besides his loose emotions, existent to a degree but dulled from the water and pressure, in the manner only dreams could be. Like one, he hardly thought much of his forced sleep through the ages, or of ever waking up. Those were impossibilities he couldn’t map, thus, they were never part of the dream itself, and himself was mostly absent from the theater he observed. Nothing physical could brush him, the cold of the Void and the heat of the marked’s skills being used weren’t anything in the realm of a physical feeling.

To take his first breath was as painful as it was for a newborn. His legs began aching quickly simply from holding his weight up. His eyes didn’t obey with ease, his movements were wild, uncomfortable things. He was quickly introduced to pain, and even now he wasn’t sure he was familiar with its depths. It surprised every time, but quickly was distanced from his mind as he tried to map how exactly it felt. The needle barely hurt, something too discrete and small for him to register. The sting of the cold injection was a far more throbbing pain to analyse, and he tried to count, with a physician’s morbid curiosity, how long before his body began reacting to what she was injecting him with.

He had a thousand guesses, and he liked them very much. Guesses, not certainties. Speculation and wonder instead of knowledge. The looming unknown of mortality that seemed to frighten so many, but not him. He still knew more than most, and the guesswork of something volatile had been his only company and pleasure throughout the ages. He relished on it as it lasted, his eyes watching with eerie paleness the Head Alchemist put the syringe aside. 

“I think that is the only way we can work with whatever he has.” Billie stated, a step to the side, closer to the reclining chair he was sat at. “Treat whatever shows up and hope for the best.”

The blade on her hip remained a Hollow through it all, flickering in and out of time, the one puncture it couldn’t cut through - itself. It cut reality, but not the other way around. Like her Void given traits, it could choose how reality was shaped, tools of choice, but not to be chosen. He wasn’t sure how to feel about it, now. The sight of it froze his heart in an unexplained clench, yet, he felt an odd kinship to it. He might have left the Void, but he still related to it. How could he not?

“That is not a recommended medical practice, especially when the other option leads to a more accurate diagnosis.” Alexandria Hypatia was a totem of patience, but with a practitioner's insistence. Nonetheless, as she checked his eyes once more, her fingers cold against his cheek; she knew that this wasn’t a stubborn miner she was managing. She knew she would get no answers from Billie Lurk, and by all he had told her so far, he might as well be a mute.

“...I will stand by my diagnosis of psychological trauma. Possibility of torture, he has signs of prolonged and or alternated hypoxaemia. He should stay in observation for a while, it was severe enough by the looks of it and there might be long term side effects.” He had arrived at a similar conclusion not too long before they arrived here, although he wasn’t positive on how it would play out. By no means he should be able to walk still, or to retain control of his limbs as he did, but here he was. To say the least, he was interested in observing the outcome.

“Very well. I will keep an eye on him.” Billie stated, and Alexandria for the first time since his arrival, she offered the killer a frown. “He will stay. For a week at least. If something happens, you won’t have the means to handle a complication if he has one.”

The leather of Billie’s old gloves squealed a little. The world liked to tell her no, time and time again, and Billie Lurk was not one to take it with ease, if to take it at all. Like her new blade, she would cut through impossible walls at the pace of her own resourcefulness, stubbornness and intelligence. 

So much like Daud, she couldn’t even imagine how alike they were. Not the same, but so very alike at times. 

To think of Daud brought a tangle of pain and ancient aches that he wasn’t ready to face. He distanced it from his mind, as if he was still in the Void and could feed to the emptiness all his pains, his woes and comforts. He wasn’t in the Void anymore, but the technique still worked. “I suppose that by how crowded this place is, you won’t be giving him a room of his own.”

Alexandria’s smile was apologetic, but also comforting. “...The situation is difficult here. The Duke had the Institute reopened and we are receiving plenty of funds, but most are going to restoration efforts and to training the staff. We are also starting with our reserves and pantries empty. We can’t spare giving him an exclusive room, we barely can spare him a cot, even if you pay.”

Went unspoken that there was no room for Billie here either, and she looked leagues away from comfortable. Alexandria took the syringe and instruments back to her worktable, a moment Billie chose to put her gloved hand on his arm. Her fingers were long and promised to lace themselves with ease around his arm, far from his wrist, should she just close her fingers. She wasn’t a tall woman, perhaps growing as an urchin had stunted her growth like it might have done to his. But she was strong and terribly agile, enough to put her in the same tier of any other arcane fighter he had observed.

Her hand had weight on his arm, her eye a fierce stare, but her voice was terribly gentle as she spoke, as quiet as if afraid of eavesdropping. It wasn’t information that she feared that was heard, no. But rather her intonation. “...Is that fine with you? You think you can stay? I can arrange something else, I can sleep on the greenhouse-”

“Billie Lurk.” He halted her, offering her a smile that she had called hideous before. Sharp and pale, contoured by unhealthily dark lips. His hand rested above her own, fingers a blueish colour, darkening like dusk. “I can stay quiet and out of trouble for a few days.”

“Can you?” She argued, for so far, he couldn’t. She complained often about his talkative nature, with comments she judged as cryptic and eerie as they once were, and apparently they made her concerned over his ability to hold his tongue around others. He wasn’t so much of a fool - he pestered her because she was her, one of _his_. Blessed and cursed with powers of the Void and his interest, he permitted himself to talk with her freely because he could, because he cared to see what she would do at the face of his words. 

He wasn’t so naive to think he was as safe with the rest of the world as he was with her. He wouldn’t get cocky, and he would hold his tongue. “I can. I will be quiet and out of trouble.”

She didn’t seem to believe him much, no. But from all the things he had ever seen in the Void, all the possibilities, hers were the ones he saw the least, and in none of them had it ever been hinted that she could be so strangely protective of a boy she had been sent to kill. Like all the marked and chosen, she had that beautiful and insufferable trait of being difficult to predict, her heart the size of her bravery could toll to many directions, and his had not been one he had predicted.

How it sat in her mind, he didn’t know. Did she see another urchin on him, just like her? Or another of her former brothers in arms? Was he akin to her Deirdre? Lost young to this world and Billie’s confidant in all her woes and secrets, now having a second chance that the other youth never had. He couldn’t know for certain, but he enjoyed the guesswork. His justifications for liking Lurk were far more simple; she was Daud’s daughter to every cell of her body, better in many aspects, unique and apart from him in thousands of others.

No different from the marked, she had a particularly dear place in his heart. And perhaps she was the only one of them that didn’t loathe him, not too much at least. “...I will head to Stilton’s, then. Stay out of trouble, and wait here for me to pick you up. If I hear you decided to make the route there yourself, I swear on the old man…”

He spaced out as she carried on with her threat, but held on his smile for her. It was still a strange feeling being _liked_ , as fickle and foreign and misplaced it was. It was bittersweet too, but he didn’t want to think of it. He would, in due time.

Like Corvo, like Emily. If people were compositions painted by experience and details, then he was in part, them too. There was time for everything, and there was time for action, time to wait, time to heal. Pacing everything was the art of courts and they had perfected it to a notch, like a killer on a rooftop, like witches in an Institute. He had all of them in his heart, and he ought to use it. 

As Alexandria walked back to him, Billie raised her eyes to the Head Alchemist, conformity adorning her features and certainly giving her a bitter taste. “You keep an eye on him then, Doctor. I will visit every other day and take him when you decide he is good to go.” 

“Please call me Alexandria. And of course, I will take good care of him.” She said, to which Billie nodded, meeting her gaze, then his. She looked at him for a long while, as if waiting for him to change his mind, request for her to stay - taking him out of here she wouldn’t do, she worried about his health far more than he did. 

As he voiced no objections, she vanished from sight, her presence becoming shards that crumbled on the floor like ceramic pieces that flickered back into the Void like a solved Hollow. Doctor Hypatia, in all her quietness and ease, took in a sound breath at the sight. She knew of Emily of course, and knew the nature of the Empress’ trade during the schemes against her coup. She was explained nothing, but she wasn’t a fool. Two Witch-Empresses were fighting for a throne, and the Alchemist knew which one she wanted in power.

It was enough for Hypatia. She didn’t seek to know more, an intelligent move of hers. It wasn’t the first time in her history that her path crossed with the supernatural and she simply disregarded it; not denying its existence, but denying meddling with that kind of unknown. Her talent was Alchemy and she would make her solutions through it and it alone. She was not qualified in witchcraft, nor wished to be, it wasn’t her passion.

An interesting show of a sound mind, but not exactly rare. He hadn’t cared much, admittedly. He had wished perhaps that Sokolov had had the same idea, it certainly would have made him more interesting. 

“...So.” Alexandria seemed to state more to snap her attention back to him more than to get his attention. “She mentioned you don’t have a name. What about an alias?”

He had considered that in their couple days downriver, of course. He needed a name, because while he had his, it was… His. Most people lived and died unaware of the power a name had, and it used to be his only belonging. One of the many reasons why he was the perfect candidate for the Void, it wasn’t only the stars he was born under, the conditions of his upbringing or his attuning to the Void even in life, no.

All it took to detach him entirely from the living world, all he had harbouring him down to reality was reality, a sense of self and nothing else. He lost it once, he couldn’t give that name to just anyone. He had tried to mutter it to Billie, but it choked him like a sob. They didn’t discuss the subject again, and she had told Doctor Hypatia to avoid doing the same. Yet, here they were.

“An alias becomes a name if you don’t watch it closely. I am not ready to be bound by one just yet.” He explained, and by the way she looked at him, he wasn’t sure what might be passing through her mind. He could guess she had heard something similar before, or was surprised to hear he had a voice, he couldn’t tell. For an exhilarating and concerning moment, he simply had no idea.

He relished on it for as long as that stare was held. “...Fine. I’m going to put nothing in your file, but don’t expect the nurses or the other patients to don’t be curious, or make up nicknames.”

“That is fine.” He said, and as she offered him her hand, he took it to stand. His legs ached from being in the chair for the while he had. His heart remained racing, but no long he felt as dulled as he had before. He had forgotten to keep track of the effects of the medication, hadn’t he? He most certainly had, and now he was aware of how it felt like a kick.

Epinephrine, without doubt. She led him out of the small room, a discrete consultory on the periphery of the woman’s laboratory. He had the Institute mapped in his mind, although possibly severely outdated. The last time he had turned his eyes to here was during Vera Moray’s stay while it was standing in complete order, and then only through Emily’s venture, when it was in complete disarray. Since then, he hadn’t bothered to watch how it was rearranged itself. 

The layout seemed to remain mostly the same. The place was too wide and too full of debris and maintenance workers, debatably more of those than alchemists, nurses and cleaning staff all together. The number of patients were many, more than often sharing rooms at the wings. Some rooms were still sealed off, or open while men worked. 

She led him to a quiet room where three of five cots were taken and gave him the fifth. She took a paper from a grid by the foot of the cot’s structure, and supporting it in a board, she began writing down on it. The cots were new and clean, as were most of the items in the room. As he sat down, his eyes gazed to the murky whiteness of the window next to him. Even through it, he could see the lining of Serkonos and the ocean, contrasting with the paleness of the sky.

A few days of recovery. He could manage that, surely. His chosen had always endured worse, much worse, and even Vera had managed to stay put long enough to be released from here. He wouldn’t be any different. “When the effects of the medication I gave you passes, you’ll feel very tired. Please rest when it does, and call if you feel like anything is wrong, there are nurses on the next door and they check in here constantly.”

His eyes turned back to Hypatia. His easy smiles had all left with Billie Lurk. “Very well.”

She did not insist on stretching the conversation, and for it he was thankful. As she left, his eyes strayed once more to the white glass and the shadow of the island beyond it, just a discrete hint familiar only to someone used to watching it from a distance - or someone who had seen it from all possible angles.

Without Lurk, part of his humour left as well. He couldn’t say that he was afraid of being here, being alone wasn’t particularly a frightening thought in his mind. But being sightless was. He had watched people build anew and transverse the dark countless of times before, enough that he might have it down to a science. How to build up. How Aramis had done it. How Delilah had done it. How Emily had done it. They all had done it in different ways, through different means and towards different goals and he surely could tailor himself to any direction.

But he underestimated gravely the feeling of loss and unknown they all had felt when they saw no light whatsoever. For him that saw all possibilities, it was easy to pick a route. They saw nothing, however, rummaged blindly through their choices and it never seemed easy to make the choices they made, but they always made it seem like the compass of decision was in their hearts all this time, showing them the way. Maybe it was, and he just lacked one.

 _One day at a time,_ he told himself. He might feel more comfortable with planning ahead, but that might not be the case right now. It rarely was. Patience, without seeing an end to it, was a difficult thing. But he held on that thought and his experience through _them_ and let it comfort him.

He held on with a little of Vera’s and Delilah’s patience, and their ability to tailor their behaviours depending on occasion and circumstance. He had always adored to see people like them facing the brink of change. It was his turn now.

They weren’t watching, but as if they were, he hoped he could make them proud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God left the server, ok? Here’s some predictions and goals:
> 
> Where is this going? I don’t know. It writes itself and I already am writing past my envisioned outline.
> 
> What to expect? A lot of Outsider and Daud dynamics, Whalers, and Serkonos politics.
> 
> Is this a romance? Possibly. I haven’t decided. Definitely somewhat shippy, because I see our Outsider as someone who loves his marked very much but all in different ways. And I am as much of a sucker for Daud/Outsider as I am for Corvo/Outsider, but I wonder if anyone would even bother reading anything that’s Daudsider. DOTO did this ship dirty.
> 
> Does Corvo and Emily show up? Eventually and hopefully. I’m slow.
> 
> Leave questions if you have any. Or just a comment. Or a bookmark. Or just a like. Thank ye.


	2. To Visit

For the first time since he had left the Void, he slept thoroughly, differently from the scarce naps he managed to take on board of the skiff or the times he passed out against that same boat’s metal benches.

He dreamt. If his stay in the Void was not to be considered, he dreamt for the first time in thousands of years. It shouldn’t surprise him that what greeted him beyond was the Void, in all its familiarity.

It brought no distress to his heart, not like he thought it would. It had changed. He wondered who was it that changed the most, him or the Void. Mattered not, he would have recognised it regardless of the colour it decided to paint itself, regardless of how it presented the shards and pieces of existence that it gathered, be it through stone, wood or glass. He knew it for what it was under it all - the endless, undistinguishable abyss, and its new form simply was the display that a new tenant had moved in.

And he had redecorated.

It was a structural change. The planes he walked in were metal, where his own had been black stone. The Void when he inhabited it used to make constructs like breaking waves, pushed to one or many directions, spires and thorns caught in the tossing movement, done by an immense strength. They housed in stone the frozen moments of history, as if they were vessels trying to navigate the blackened waves.

Endless wind and twisted gravity filled his Void, the current of whispers and the points wherein he had produced anchors, vortexes and perforations for the many people he answered and aided throughout time. The whales were beyond welcome, his Void was particularly tailored to be navigable by their great bodies. Light was parallel, if not from beneath. Dark blue or purple was the undertone of all the gray. His Void was unique to men’s perception for like his face, it presented his own embodiment and filter of the abyss. It was his own construction, something for people to understand slightly what was, at its core, incomprehensible.

This new version was as different as it could be. Underneath his boots, the texture was of metal, bristled and ranging from pale grays to the darkest ones, tainted red with rust at various unarranged spots. No impossible waves, but rather impossible constructs. Rare curves, broken windows, archways and steps, leading nowhere. It was a maze that folded on itself, an urban scenery of endless planes, countless routes, leading nowhere. A broken city with pools over rust, red like anaemic blood, with dark tendrils and clouds spiralling at corners, smoke or steam, the Void breathing through a crack on the metal terrain, and like a boiler and pipes, it wheezed.

Daud had always been urban, shaped by Dunwall and shaping it to his will. Came as no surprise, from all the times the man had compared it to the cruelty of the Void, that his Void inevitably looked like a distorted, metallic city. 

His steps sounded damp as he walked, fingers coming to rest over a railing of this same metal that composed everything. Cold to the touch, where the steam and smoke felt warm against his cheek. Made him want to cough. Regardless of how it looked, he felt it, felt the Void singing through the whistling steam, felt its cold harshness on the metal that dug on his hands. 

It wasn’t his home anymore, no. But it had been once. The sight and it's reddened landscape brought an unnamed feeling to his heart that he wasn’t sure many could relate. Who could ever truly relate to all he had been feeling lately?

None perhaps but the man that appeared on his peripherals, a man that no longer was a man, looking as he looked in the memory of people. It was a peculiar choice to present himself like this - the circumstances that made him Outsider were far different from Daud’s, which left the once-God with the impression some things he took as unalterable must apply differently to him.

He looked like his posters did, much like the painting Sokolov had produced of him years ago. At the most steep part of his curve of infamy, Daud had been young. Older than himself, surely, but younger than Corvo had been during the first coup. An assassin on the rise, known for his red coat and gloved hands, a scar crossing from his temple to his cheek, parting his brow, caught even now in an eternal frown. Displeased, with the world, with people, with circumstance. 

To see him once again was to face emotions he had suffocated since the moment the Void spat him out, and seemed to claim the earliest soul to arrive and welcome its cold grasp as an old friend would. 

Words were a livid thing, knotted on his throat like the veins constricting his heart. He once knew everything, everything the man had said when he thought no one was hearing, everything that lived in his heart. Now, he knew nothing besides that the man took the spot himself sat at mere days ago, with all its regalies and knowledge and drawbacks. 

It was so good to see him, however. His throat felt dry, and his eyes felt the opposite. “You understand now.”

The only thing that wasn’t the same from that Daud of decades ago - bold, harsh, an arcane assassin through the veins of Dunwall - was that his eyes were the same unnerving black himself had sported through thousands of years.

To his words, he simply nodded, his hands bringing themselves to fold behind his back as he was so taken on doing in life. “As do you.”

And he did. He understood it now, more than ever. How could Daud feel like he was the root of all evil, how could he make mistakes when gambling with people and their pleas. Feeling enough to wish to help, wishing to interfere, but not feeling or knowing enough to be able to predict where they would go. Lives were a thousand crossroads, each step a new one, closing routes that were once available or opening new ones that were never there before.

He had always bestowed his gift to the desperate, those in the brink of change and who had it in their hands the potential to do great things. Not always they achieved such, but he carried the weight of their crimes either way, while their success often went unthanked. To produce a rune could simply ease the nightmares of a child, or could inspire an entire cult to crowd the streets for the next century and beyond, bringing more misery and chaos than he could ever hope to intentionally deliver. Daud could see it now. 

Perhaps he could see now everything else he had done, too, and the motives behind it. From the silence he handed the assassin, afraid of what his praise had done to the man, from the bitterness in which he regarded him with every time they spoke afterwards. Why he gave him Delilah, a little for the Empire’s fate, a great deal of it for Daud and Daud alone. He had accused him in his heart, but never spoke it out loud, of having Corvo as his favourite, but it had never been true.

“I do.” The once-God muttered, feeling his lips tighten as he watched Daud’s darkened gaze hold his own. So long since he had seen this stupid, insufferable man, and now he was fated to what himself had just escaped from. The despair he felt in his heart was mourning, he concluded. “Does it suit you? Being the Outsider?”

He mourned that perhaps Daud didn’t get the rest his tired last years had longed so much to have. Mourned that he was sentenced to the same prison himself had only recently escaped from; one tailored for him or constructed to his own comfort and resemblance, for the Void and to Daud’s death heart, there might be no difference, but to his own living heart it meant the world. So long himself had gone without being asked permission.

“It does.” His voice remained the very same, even if altered and distorted by depth, speaking through all the leagues of the Void like whalesong and the whistle of steam, gravelly as he had been in life, like rain on metal rooftops. “I have many sins to atone for, this is my second chance, another after the one you gave me. I will do things differently, now.”

Of course he would. They were different, after all. Daud, as far as himself knew, still had his name. He was dead in the Void, not caged or dreaming. He hoped that with these differences, so did the dead man have the choice of fading to nothingness if he ever wanted to. It was more choice than himself ever had. The life the man had lived before this moment taught him much, would pave the way to choices he didn’t think himself could have made in his place, even now he couldn’t.

He wasn’t half the man Daud had been, even if through most of his life, he threaded through existence in a path far from the light. He still had risen to call and task when fate had beckoned. He was unique, remarkable even through all of the marked. “...And I hope to do things a little like you. Not an easy task, I think. You have left quite a legacy after you.”

The assassin laughed rarely, and this seemed to be one of these precious, scarce moments. It wasn’t a pleasant noise, nor had a pleasant feeling. It was veiled criticism, far from subtle but as smooth as a gloved caress, even if it was anything but one. He was so terribly fond of it, however. “I could say the same. I see much, but I see you the least. I don’t know what you will do, nor what you have done from the Void. I see the results of what you did, not how.”

Daud might be an old man, and with it, all his experiences set him apart as an extraordinary man. But by all means, he was a very young God, and it didn’t surprise him that much might be hidden from him, not only the future of the boy who was once a God. It had taken himself several millennia to learn how to tread the Void as he used to. How to wield the power of the dead, even if out of his reach, to work like a seamstress and join the Void and the existing world in something more orderly and stable than a Hollow. Took him ages to discover how bones and flesh could bridge both realms and craft peculiar connections. The abilities hidden in whalebone, the power of music and art and bloodshed, the tools in human hands to make both realms toll, at times at their wish.

He might be a young man, who has seen nearly nothing of the world through his own eyes, but he was a very old God. Unsurprising that somehow, he shared a kind of inverted dynamic with the new Outsider. He had been returned to the world, but after years of attunement to the Void, was he truly just a man? If so, he should have forgotten the dream, but so far he hadn’t.

Him and Daud were transversing this dynamic in the dark, he supposed, with the whole of mankind not even being aware these were things to be debated, nor what was at the stake here. The rise of a new Outsider was worldchanging, and people weren’t even aware. In more ways than one, this hadn’t changed. Perhaps this would never change. 

“My knowledge is yours. It's the least I can do. Even if I am not sure if what I know can apply to your Void.” Seeing into his heart or not, Daud must know from memory alone that the boy who had been Outsider had always found a way to aid him. This time wouldn’t be any different. “Is that why I am here?”

A fair question, that Daud answered by disappearing in shards of metal and speckles of reflected light, as dim as dust in the air. He reappeared on his opposite side, his boots that once ran through Dunwall now soundless in his own sharp, metallic kingdom. “No. You’re here because I wanted you to see it.”

As his gloved hand gestured to the entirety of the Void, and the boy who was once a God wondered what to take from all of it. It looked different, without a doubt, but Daud wasn’t here asking for approval. He never asked, even when he had sought it. This place was old, he could feel it, the age and the shards of existence that were accumulated here would always be the same, even if they weren’t visible to him anymore.

He would try to venture this new face of the Void, but the staircase next to him followed up for a few steps, before it bent in a degree and continued diagonally and upside down. Perhaps if he had more to his body than skin, bones and a history of malnourishment, he could try to climb parts of it, and the risk of falling would be less frightening. But he had no skills to himself and he wasn’t as eager as the people he marked to explore the Void.

The answer to Daud’s question was already in what he could see. Or rather, on what he wasn’t seeing. He turned his head to Daud in a quick turn. “We are in the ritual hold.”

The new Outsider nodded, crossing his arms. This was the ritual hold, in Daud’s new refurbishing, in his own interpretation of the Void. It was intricate and old still, and turning his eyes beyond the constructs to the horizon beyond, he didn’t need to search too much before he saw the movement of a tail, a leviathan swimming outside of this maze. 

The beasts weren’t the only inhabitants of this part of the Void, however. He looked around quickly, stepping back and away from any of the rust-coated walls, his eyes searching for any noise beyond steam and whistling, he searched for the Envisioned. But there wasn't any sign of them. 

“They are gone, as is everyone else. The older whales and the older marked too.” He explained, but it did little to ease his heart. 

The envisioned appeared to mortal men as structures of Void and its stone, but like all things in the Void, they were shapeless, indescribable if not for his presence to make their sight of the Void something tailored to the human eye. The whales however, had never needed an interpretation, a translation, to touch the abyss. They used the Void’s pull and the endless trajectories, existant or not, to coordinate themselves in the world above. When they died, their spirits found their way to what their inner compasses pointed, the Void’s oldest spot and his resting place.

He could hear them through his dream, back when he was the Outsider. Hear their songs that perforated both realms losing little to nothing of their meaning and composition. Like whispers, like dreams, like the secrets of men, that had free pass from reality and the impossible abyss and back. Those had never needed his interpretation. He always found it lulling, the one thing he was certain was grounding, as much as the volatility and strength of men’s will.

No other being could alter both realms, the Void and existence, as much as men could. That was why he was needed, that's why they were marked. The only uncertainty for the Void was the decisions men made, and they had shared this fascination, for they were one. And the Envisioned, like the boy’s rendition of the Void, appeared as the monstrosities of a boy’s nightmare, but in the Void they were as unshaped as the abyss itself, a spark of life, the only light that could exist in the endless dark.

They were as they looked, everything was as it looked, because it had been painted by his mind so men could understand what he saw. White and edged and flawed, lethal and observing, larger than any men. For him however, sometimes they wore human faces. Most of the time, they wore the exact same faces they did when alive, but paled by blinding light.

To be the Outsider was to be caged in a black coffin, within a white tomb, and they were his white-clad captors, white-light sentinels. The Void was endless dark and everything anyone knew of it was his own drawings on the coffin’s inner walls, the way he imagined the noise he could hear within, the monsters he dreamt of in his prison.

He had never liked the sight of these Envisioned, he never visited the Eyeless, nor had ever needed to. His existence alone and his rendition of the Void permitted them to study and find patterns in it that were once impossible, and that was their goal. They needed someone to translate the dark, and he had done it, they didn’t need to talk to the translator anymore. They only cared to guard his cell, and had done it well, so well in fact, that there he remained for four thousand years. They never had needed to interact, they already had what they wanted.

As a man, he felt for them differently now. Shouldn’t come to him as a surprise that once he had simply disliked them, now the mere thought of them triggered something animalistic and raw. He discovered that he was utterly terrified of them.

“Why are you telling me this?” He asked, his expression haunting - when was the last time he had felt fear, as raw and crude as this one? Back when he was alive, only. “You’re interfering, or trying to.”

He used to do the same, once. Do things that weren’t clear to most, hand out words and sights and whispers that for most, went unnoticed, but to a select few, a particularly cunning few, those words were remembered when the time was right. Discrete interference, to keep people in the right path, or to hopefully close off the darkest ones. Daud was doing the same, with the crudeness of a trainee butcher, but he was. 

“I did say I’d do this differently. I want to do more than you did.” The new Outsider seemed annoyed, something that used to feel wonderful to spot on Daud, and that emotion had been amplified now with his newfound mortality. Almost wonderful enough to make him forget what memory it was that Daud so harshly brought back to the top of his mind.

The Envisioned. He would wake up looking for them, without a doubt. How many times he had done the same, handed something to men and watched them wake up in terror when they woke up? But then, those were only bad memories, and there were only two kinds of Void - the one of his own making, the language, and the raw unattainable one, the meaning that words could barely convey. Crossing them wasn’t a wise idea, and doing so tore many apart. He had broken Piero Joplin like this.

Yet, much like how he felt with Billie, this was an odd thing, this idea that from all people in the world Daud could be trying to run tests of interference with, he was choosing to do so on him. He had nothing in the waking word besides a name, and now, Billie Lurk. Her liking towards him was enough of an anchor. If he vanished, she would search, if he died, she would mourn. It wasn’t something he had before.

And now, he had Daud, in a way. Differently than how the marked and chosen had himself, but they had him, even if they didn’t realise. He didn’t think he was being too bold to think that when he offered the new Outsider his knowledge, it was somehow a two-way route. Every exchange in the Void was, even if the price wasn’t clear until it was paid. Now that was something Daud learnt in life, and learnt it well.

“You ought to be more careful. This breaks people.” He explained, a frown reaching his features. Daud did mention he didn’t see much of the former Outsider’s doings, only the results, so he might as well not know. “This is how I broke Piero Joplin.”

He was well intentioned, he had no doubt. Daud was letting him know of this information in hopes this would bring some good change, or perhaps prevent something from being lost or derailed. At the very least, he hoped to bring comfort. Regardless, he must have good intentions. Just like himself when he had needed Piero, his craftsmanship and his genius, to produce a serum that would ward away the sickness from Dunwall for a moment longer, and through his inventions, aid Corvo and the then-Child Empress.

He had abused the man’s mind, however. Hadn’t asked him permission for it either, no. The memory made his stomach turn; yet another regret, another sin for himself to attone, like Daud was atoning to his. He had been used but he had used people at his leisure as well, the concept entirely unimportant for him in the Void, but he knew better now. Hopefully Daud knew better too. If his silence was anything to consider, maybe he did.

“When I wake, this will either be something I can make sense of, or it won’t… I can only hope this piece of information is worth the gamble.” He said, and Daud watched him with unbothered, unaltered black eyes. He knew how that was like - it wasn’t that he couldn’t feel sorry, nor responsible over what he had done. He was simply caught in the calculations of it, mapping possible consequences he could take from Piero’s own trajectory.

The once-God wouldn’t take it to heart, even if he wasn’t pleased. He had no direction to send his life towards, no goals so far. But with Daud’s meddling, he was starting to feel concerned about how easy it might be to lose it. A gamble indeed. The new Outsider tilted his head like a Pandyssian bird in thought. “...Let us hope so. This is meant to be a comfort in due time, it is the only thing I can see ahead of you-”

When he was Outsider, people who got too close to touch him tended to don’t wake up. For nothing besides the fact that he despised it, touch was not something he permitted often, and the number of people he brought into the Void were few. Daud didn’t react however to the hand he quickly placed over the new Outsider’s mouth, an unmeasurable anxiety bubbling in his heart the more the new deity talked.

If himself was still connected to the Void, it was not through Daud but through his personal attuning. He understood the Void raw, and created his own language. Piero had been one of many that, like him in his former life, were born under certain stars and a certain day, and he could understand and reach more of the raw Void than most people could. But the then-Outsider had interfered, had pushed his own interpretation, to make use of the man’s skills. His own interpretation of it was completely different from Daud’s, and to cross both languages was a gamble indeed.

All it needed to take was a single badly translated word for the human mind to begin breaking, like wires connected to the wrong circuitry. This was already risky, but tossing dice twice just increased the odds of a bad outcome. “Are you still trying to get me killed?”

The assassin’s gloved hand wrapped and closed around his wrist, and despite the size and weight of it, the grip was gentle as he pulled his hand away from his mouth. His own hands were shaking, he realised distantly - not from the cold of the Void but out of fear. The survivalist’s fear was back into his life, making him review his reactions, making him fear for his life, fear the Envisioned and the white-clad Eyeless, made him fear losing his name… Fear, unsurprisingly, was the earliest development in his new life.

“Don’t be a bastard.” Daud warned him, and the boy who was once a God took in a deep breath, one that shook in the depths of his lungs. Daud was a very lousy God, and for a moment, he feared for this world of his too, a world he didn’t even get to meet properly, having just arrived in it.

“You’re the one being a bastard.” He replied, pulling his wrist out of the new Outsider’s grasp. His only comfort so far was the tolerance the former assassin was willing to give him. He would be flattered if he didn’t think that this would also be his downfall. “...You don’t talk and don’t show me anything anymore. I will think of something to get around this, Piero managed to, so can I. If we ought to meet, we do it there, not here.”

Could he, though? He ran his fingers through his face, letting them run all the way through his hair to the nape of his hair. He would have to figure something out

He didn’t _have to_ , really, but could he not? He wanted Daud to succeed, to be as fulfilled as one in his current place could be. The assassin was doing what he saw as his ultimate attempt at redemption, and he had always felt so strongly for his marked and chosen, Daud no less. The marked rarely seemed to realise how much he had been willing to do to help them in their trajectories, and those who did realise, seemed to turn for the worst. Perhaps it was best when they didn’t know.

Maybe this was his own redemption too, coming his way with high chances of death and harm. The living world truly wasn’t kind, and existence was a fragile thing. 

“Send me back.” He told Daud, and the new Outsider nodded slowly, a snap of fingers prepared and tensioned on his leather-coated hands. A gesture that once used to summon his bound Whalers, now translated to his new unlife.

“I will make sure the nurses will be around when you wake.” He explained, before his fingers snapped without making a sound. The assassin’s Void trembled, distorted itself, darkened at the fringes before twisting in blades that sheathed themselves behind its new inhabitant. The realm that didn’t exist folded out of his reach - or rather, his access to this interpretation of it closed. 

The stillness of it, outside of time and the rules of the existing world, prevented any consequence from happening immediately while he was in Daud’s Void.

In the waking world, however, he had no time to react. His pale eyes opened and he was already thrashing. Fever plagued his body with pains hammered like nails in the junction of every bone, every joint. His eyes opened, just to roll back into his skull. It was burning. His body was burning, wet with the sweat of hours, his eyes hurting enough that he doubted not he might lose them, even if he survived it.

There were nurses and doctors alright, as Daud had promised. He couldn’t see them, but they were the cold, harsh hands trying to pin his convulsing body, working to open his jaw to slip a thick fabric between his teeth to keep them from breaking. He couldn’t make sense of what they were speaking, or of anything else. His eyes only saw the red of the inside of his skull, felt as if his nerves were doused in a burning liquid, like whaleoil aflame. 

He convulsed violently, intensely enough that his consciousness, just momentarily regained, was starting to escape him again. The last thing he could remember was a fleeting curse looped in the back of his head.

_Black-eyed bastard._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently this work went from generic human Outsider going yada yada to semiotic understanding of the Void and God/demigod dynamics. Do I mind it? No, I do not. Feel free to abandon ship if this ain’t your thing. I hope to sound clearer and explain linguistics without making it an infodump. I am highly prolix in my writing and I am working on changing that (and am failing, as you can see).
> 
> Thanks to all the 4 guests and 2 people who gave kudos by the time of this being posted. OneRandomThing and viviene, I don’t know y’all but consider your foreheads gently kissed by an internet stranger. Mwah. May you find this second chapter next time you’re browsing AO3. 
> 
> Questions welcome in the comments, and thank you for pressing “next chapter” and enduring this to the very end.


	3. To Ask

The first thing he registered were sounds, distant somewhere in his head and as irrelevant as they could be. He didn’t pay them much mind. The cough of a man far away surely did not concern him, he had no living male acquaintances in his so far short second life. There were the repetitive sounds of a fan, blades spinning and pushing the air with a mismatched rhythm. He could feel every time the device turned towards him, for it made his damp body a little colder on the surface, made his forehead feel a little bit drier. 

His eyes were still closed when he moved on an elbow, feeling the whole weight of the world against his chest, aches littering every muscle involved in the task of rising a little and just moving his head and chest to the side, his best effort to prevent throwing up on himself instead of the floor.

Now that was a disruptive noise. Everything hurt, especially the tightening of his stomach to push away whatever mucus he might have left in his stomach, it felt like punches and he trembled, like the urchin he had been before, trembled from his darkened lips to his bluish fingertips.

Only then his eyes bothered with the task of opening, blinking lethargically as he tried to make sense of what surrounded him. To clear the blur of his sight was a slow process, but eventually he saw the tiles on the floor, a couple cracked, many dulled by time and humidity. He saw a puddle, of black clotted blood and watery, anaemic patches on mucus. 

Alternatively, tar and rust. He hadn’t forgotten, no.  _ Daud _ . 

“Thank the Void.” He heard, the voice somewhat lost to distance but he thought that at this point, he could recognise her voice even underwater. He didn’t bother to meet her eyes, his head feeling too heavy to lift, his throat too sore to speak, his eyelids too heavy to keep up, all he managed was a grunt in answer.

In this trade of smugglers, killers, witches and morally venerable royals, he had seen some very miserable moments. Even so, without doubt, he believed they all had retained some kind of elegance even through their worse, like a Serkonan lion, even wounded and dying, it was in every inch and whimper a lion. They suffered with grit, and perished with grace, like whales thrashing against a trawler. 

He lacked all of that. He sounded like a broken wolfhound pup, miserable and drooling as it fought somehow the urge to stay put and die already. Like a street mutt indeed, they knew that to stay idle and put was to be easy prey.  _ Move. _ Everything that he was before of the ritual was bellowing to him now. 

_ Move or you’re easy prey. Move, you bastard.  _

“Hey, easy there, boy.” He heard Billie more than he saw her in the peripherals of his vision. He pushed on the mattress under him with a shaky arm, and threw his legs to the edge of the bed with far too much carelessness. Her arm quickly got to his waist, her shoulder at his cheek’s height - measures to prevent him from falling off the bed which he wasn’t sure wasn’t still going to happen with his bones seeming to have turned into marrow and jelly.

“Lay down. It has been a couple hard days for you and the Doctor is on her way.” Billie explained, and despite her request, she didn’t push him down to the bed. It was a bed now, he realised, not a cot. He supposed they found a room for him after all, small or not. The smoky window was replaced by wooden panels that were letting the evening light in from in between its blades, a panel just halfway covering the open doors that led to the rooftop terrace. He knew this place - isolated from the rest of the Institute yet very close to the Chief Alchemist’s Office, this is where the posh and wealthy usually were placed at.

Apparently, if not money, all it took was one Billie Lurk to make people scramble to set up a room there, fix it in however way they could to make it livable. The place clearly hadn’t been restored like the other parts of the Institute, but it was clean and looked stable enough. He had been out for what, a day, or perhaps a couple? His mouth tasted like foul blood and yet he felt like he might as well be dying of thirst.

As promised, soon footsteps made it to his hearing range, the clacking of heels on tile, more than a pair, that soon made it through the balcony door, framed by the evening light outside. Hypatia and a couple nurses, who looked around and quickly walked back, perhaps to call the cleaning crew. 

Alexandria Hypatia was many things, but easily disgusted or easily bothered were not those things. She simply employed a wider step on her gait before she made it to his bedside, his eyes still adjusting as he tried to make some sense of her features. “Welcome back. It is so good to see you up and awake - Foster has been a terrible guest while you were out, maybe you can keep her in line now that you’re back?”

Her tone was gentle, and a little too soft and well-paced. She looked at him, turning his head just slightly towards the door as she looked into his eyes. He knew what this was all for, he had seen Piero going through the same evaluation a thousand times. A million drugs had been described to him, time and time again, and they did little to appease the shivers, the fevers, the nightmares and the racing of his heart. They did little to appease the crisis when it came to be. 

This was the same thing, a gentle talk and searching for responses. Not so many were as lucky as Piero had been, to simply die in one of his convulsions, his heart stopping before his body did. No, many lost their memory, senses, sight, or even more subtle but equally dangerous side effects such as hallucinations and psychosis… Brain fevers caused terrible traumas to the body, a resulting condition of dabbling in a Void they could not comprehend.

Unaware of his thoughts, or even anything that led to this, Billie just let out a displeased noise at the Alchemist’s choice of words, but seemed unwilling to pick up banter on it. Odd. Usually she would. Hypatia made it to the corner of the room where from a jug, she poured in a tin mug a bit of water. He couldn’t reach for it fast enough when the Alchemist handed it to him.

“Alright… Shaky but coordinated still. He hasn’t said anything yet, has he?” Hypatia asked, and Billie only shook her head, her arm still very much in place. He would have said something if his attention wasn’t undivided on the mug he had been handed. Every drop was precious, flooding his mouth and running down his throat, it might taste like mold for all he knew, he couldn’t register the taste in the height of his thirst, nor did he care to be honest.

He might have looked miserable enough for Hypatia to quickly refill his mug. “No, he just woke up.”

The Chief Alchemist nodded, putting the jug aside and not refilling it a third time, despite him having the hopes that she would. The room wasn’t too furnitured, many of the pieces here might have been stolen or broken at the time the Addermire had been closed and the City Guard had kept it sealed away. There was no love lost between the citizens of the Isles and the City Guard - stealing or destroying furniture from the only Institute that bothered to tend to them for no cost when they were sick was not above the common guardsman.

All the same, a small dresser stood next to his bed, and the Chief Alchemist took a perch on it, half seated on it as if it was a tall stool. “Very well. Can you hear me? His eyes are responsive but we will have to run plenty of tests to know if he hasn’t developed any sequelae, which doesn’t scratch off the possibility of eventual late effects, especially if this is a recurring condition.”

He moved his hand to put the now empty tin mug on the side, but lacking a place to do so, Billie took it for him to put it on the same dresser the Head Alchemist was seated at. His voice was raspy, a meek thing, but he coerced the words out as clearly as he could.“Alright.”

Alexandria seemed to take it as the sign for her to continue. “Good. You’ve had a sudden fever that led to seizure at some point. You’ve been medicated against inflammations but we don’t have the means to know whether or not this will occur again. I am seeing a pattern of brain fever - a crisis would justify the hypoxia - which has a few known treatments that while they may not cure, they might soften the symptoms and increase lifespan.”

She explained, speaking nothing that he didn’t already know. He felt just tired, his senses still a bit numb but still registering her words. It was interesting to witness her competence and accurate diagnosis within her own understanding of the world through alchemy and natural philosophy. She couldn’t see what he saw, couldn’t understand what he understood, but she saw what existed, and made sense of it.

She wouldn’t find any inflammations on his brain, just the poison of rust and a Void that he isn't compatible with. He was a saltwater fish, thrown in a clearwater pond, and had been poisoned by it. He wondered, vaguely, if this condition would stay - by all means if he got Daud to stop intruding with his Void’s influence on his life, he perhaps could avoid an outcome like Piero’s. A speculation, truly, but worth trying. It was all he could do if he didn’t mean to throw away what had to be the hardest life to save of this millennia. 

“We will conduct plenty of tests to check the integrity of your functions, and if any of them are off we can start rehabilitation right away. You shouldn’t worry too much about it, the tests are simple and you’re young, if something is not right, you have all the means to recover in a short while. You also have a strange case of canities subita or poliosis, so we should accompany it closely to discover which and treat it so it recedes.”

Hypatia spoke all in the same tone, gentle like one explaining a shopping list with a high degree of attention and none of worry, enough that it lulled him into taking his time with her words. And he took his time indeed to hear, register and understand what she meant by the last two observations. “What?”

His eyes widened despite the paleness of the room making his head hurt, and he turned his eyes to scout the room. A tall closet with broken glass panels, a round table by the balcony, accompanied by a large, reclining chair where Billie’s coat was thrown over the seat, possibly concealing belts and her blade that he felt flickering in a Hollow more than he could see it. There were no more paintings on the walls, only the nails struck on them as well a board pinned to the peeling wallpaper. And on a corner, facing his way, there was a tall mirror with the evening sun at its right side, making its surface hard to see.

He could see Billie’s back, her shirt untucked from her high-waisted trousers, looking wrinkled as if it had been squeezed into a ball instead of folded in her travelling bag. He could see the back of her head and her arm still safekeeping him from falling off the bed should he move forward. 

Except that wasn’t him. With his jacket gone and the evening sun peeking into the room, all he could see was that blinding whiteness he had been surrounded by throughout centuries and did not miss in the slightest, was always better off when it was not brought back to his mind.

It was impossible to recognise himself, almost impossible to recognise a person. White like when the midday sun hit Shindaerey Peak and turned the North Quarry into a natural lighthouse, the men and women of the Eyeless blending with his cage in their white attires, white hairs, white eyes without pupils. A place where everything was either a white tomb or a glimpse of the black coffin within, a place where it was impossible to exist in-betweens for it was one. A place he had suppressed the despair of earning to escape from for thousands of years.

Fear was an odd thing. The first strong human emotion to introduce itself to him, and to show its versatility and range without shame. Not all things in the existing world went in full circle - many liked to believe that the world punished wicked people eventually and in quiet ways, but it often did not. It did, however, produce fates that came in full circles as often as it didn’t. This was his full circle.

He had his name taken and was used by people without forewarning, without any respite to his wishes. He had gone so long in the Void without thinking of it, the awareness simply existing in a place of normalcy, for a pond did not care nor demanded plea when the animals came to drink from it. Whatever his human nature could grasp of it, was dulled and vague, it was a displeasure to ignore, for there was nothing to be done about it. And in a similar way, he had demanded it, demanded the same subservience from the people he chose, he branded them marks and killed their minds, he never asked, even if he never lied.

Abuse was a circle and he had been as bad as the ones who trapped him. It seemed like a fitting punishment somehow that he looked exactly how his memory recalled them, now that he could feel every inch of the trauma, process it for the first time in forever.

He didn’t know what was it that was stuck in his throat, a scream or a sob, it was lost to his mind but it bled out of him in a broken whimper, like the creaking of his lungs as his breathing broke their pattern. It felt like a torturer’s understanding of a joke, and it must be one; to paint him one morning in the colourless palette of the one sight he couldn’t stand thinking of, and just expect him to live on with it, carry on as anyone else would, it was a devious punishment. Be set aflame and expected to carry on, find some purpose in this life he had no direction to aim it to.

Fight or flight was an urchin’s primal instinct and Billie seemed to know it too well, for she quickly tightened his hold on him, a moment sooner than when he tried to move away. To where, he didn’t know, this was not something to run away from. It was something to live burdened with until death, and he knew it too, felt the weight of that notion too well. His sobs became sharper, louder, hideous, as his fingernails dug on the nearest thing. Billie’s arm, his hair, his scarred throat, anything that could be harmed, everything he wanted to harm. 

“It's like  _ them- _ ” He moaned, shaking enough that the former assassin employed more force on holding him still, an iron strength on taking his hand away from his face and lowering his head from the mirror’s sight. 

“Shhhh. It’s alright.” She muttered, holding him in a grip that bordered being painful. He closed his eyes against her shoulder, but he knew what awaited whenever he opened his eyes again. His pale eyes, in a pale face, now framed by the only thing that was left to become pale too and it had just done so. He belonged to the Void still like a bone charm, pale like bone from the hairs on his brow to the irises in his eyes. Like a rune, he wailed away his fear, his hate, in an infant’s intelligible sobs. 

He should have known, the moment Billie led him into the existing world that he wasn’t free; in a way, he would never be, and had never been. He had believed at the peak of his naivety, at least for a moment, that this was his chance to start anew, the change that would leave everything behind.

It never was, had never been for any of his marked, and he wondered how he could have been so foolish to think that for himself it would have been different. Even Delilah knew, and painted her masterpiece in hopes to start anew in a world where she would be loved, for in this existing world there was no way she could ever be as loved as she wanted to be. What had happened to her, all the injustices and cruelty she was a victim of were unfair and would never be brought back or undone, regardless of what she did.

How could he have believed he would be different? His fate could change, but he was never getting free from that past. The Void still reached out for him, like it always had, perhaps more than ever before save from when they were one. 

He never cried his fill. His body eventually demanded an end when he couldn’t spare anymore tears, nor the energy to grip the former assassin before him. Unlike him, she endured in unaltered, unmovable silence, with only her gloved hand coming to comb through the now-white of his hair. So much stronger than he was - by the company he used to keep, he should be stronger. But he wasn’t. 

The only expectation he had of this new life was that it would be a lighter life to live through. So far, that too seemed like asking too much.

* * *

His pale feet could still find warmth in the stones of the terrace, nails considerably less blue both on his hands as on his feet. However, his veins were still a little too obvious, mapping his thin ankles in lines of blue and purple like impossible rivers that went up and concealed themselves under the shade of his trouser’s legs, the cloth a shade of brown that seemed terribly dark in comparison to the skin it covered.

The sun was setting away from Pandyssia, minutes yet to touch the ocean line. Even so, the lulling waves seemed to play with the runaway light that the bright star cast over its surface. There were no whales breaking the waterline this evening. They weren’t so common anymore this close to land, but not entirely impossible to catch sight of a couple, no. He had heard one, the other night. He was hoping to catch sight of it eventually.

But the terrace was quiet, as was the sea around the Addermire Institute. He was alone, for once. Something he hadn’t thought he would want anytime so soon, he had enough of being alone in the Void for several million lifetimes. He was discovering however that a presence, even when good willed, could too become suffocating.

After the event of a week ago, there was nothing Doctor Hypatia could do to keep Billie Lurk away. Specially when the rooms next to him weren’t frequented but were far from being entirely unlivable, and broken gates meant little for a woman like Lurk. There just wasn’t any way of keeping her away, and do not interpret him wrong, he was immensely thankful for her company. She knew to don’t ask what he wasn’t willing to answer, she made sure his requests were met, her presence alone warded off any unexpected bout of anxiety that suddenly could strike him whenever his thoughts went too far for too long.

She was a lighthouse in the dark, surely. But after a few days, he just couldn’t keep staring at it before it began aching his eyesight too. He needed a small break, and he waited for her to eventually surrender to sleep - she rarely did so at the same hours, or letting him know of it beforehand - but when he noticed she wasn’t returning after she left unceremoniously, he took his opportunity to wander.

It was his first time at the terrace with his own two feet and his own two eyes. The pale stone was still warm from the whole day of sunlight it had welcomed, a warmth he could feel from hovering his hand over it, but the wind still felt chilly and sharp, at least in comparison. Behind him, Serkonos and the Empire, at his left, Pandyssia, at his right, the setting sun. Ahead of him, the endless depth of the ocean, not kind and not cruel, but definitely unsurvivable to men, riddled with mysteries and beings and landscapes human minds couldn’t fathom.

He knew them like people knew their own home. It was a comfort. Part of him would welcome that comfort and swim into the depths even if it killed him, but another half, wiser than that, knew it was a foolish thought, sprung out of the mess that was him trying to handle humanity. The luggage of millenia had set off like a springrazor since his release, it was a surprise he still could make sense of north, south, west and east, and no surprise at all he was a mess.

He would like to say that after the storm, he felt now like a beach, littered with debris and rejects from the sea, looking and feeling wrecked but numb, a disarray at rest, but he wasn’t sure the storm was over yet in the first place. One thing he knew from watching his marked was that peace never lasted for long, be prepared for its end or not. Because he had a couple days quieter than the ones before it did not mean anything was over. In truth by the looks of it, life was just getting started.

And he was already so, so  _ tired _ . The wind felt strangely chill, being brought from further Southeast, it caressed his cheek and made his skin tingle a little with the salt it carried. It particularly stung against the scratch marks on his bare throat, and he tried to ignore the way it messed his hair. All things he focused on not thinking of, not acknowledging. 

In his first life, winds like these used to tell him many things. Of what was going on deep inside of the oceans and all veiled things. Which schools of fish would make it to the bay, if there were any whales on this side of the coast, what the weather and tides would bring, what early births would happen overnight and what crops would fail.

Right now, he heard nothing in the wind. Not for losing that attachment to the Void, no, but because there was something on the way. Something in the middle, not interfering nor forcing itself. But on the way all the same.

He turned pale eyes to his left, his Pandyssia side. “I see you.”

Not really, but he doubted anyone else but Daud could damper down the connection he had with the Void since birth with his presence alone. Upon being called out, the world shimmered for a moment, bending into a spot like threads parting themselves to permit a needle through; from another plane entirely, a new deity emerged, already seated on the low wall of the terrace. The ocean behind him framed his presence, twisting itself like a mirage, an optical illusion wherever the man met the ocean. Daud’s Void might not be audible to him, but the frequency was enough to mute the ones he could hear.

While himself had been a discrete albeit ominous presence, Daud was everything to be expected out of an imposing God. He had always been a force of nature, visible on the way he carried himself, fierce in the weight of his frown and the tone of his voice, it was no surprise that it translated itself into his new role. His Void was wilderness, and Daud the wolf of men, the uncrowned king of a jungle of metal where leviathans breathed from chimneys and steam pumps howled to no moon.

Even seated where he was, every inch comfortable and uncaring in his composure, he remained quite a sight. Himself the whisper on men’s ears, imaginary gossip, Daud the howls in the wind, violent and lupine and absolutely human in his nature. Different Gods of a single force, but either no less accurate. Who was it that decided mankind was leagues different from the wilderness had been thoroughly wrong, and Daud exemplified that down to his bones. 

“She hasn’t left your side.” He commented, and in answer to the new Outsider, the once-God could only but shake his head slowly. Billie truly hadn’t, and he couldn’t exactly name the reason why she concerned herself so much with him. 

On one hand, he was thoroughly thankful for the company, for the experienced and somehow caring killer that had taken a liking for him, either by projecting onto him something else, or by motives far beyond the abilities of his guesswork. And on the other hand, this week had him musing on how long her interest would stick. How much longer was he going to keep her down, how long until the novelty of stretching a hand to the lost could last? For it was one of the ways he felt, as if in his indecision and idleness, justifiable or not, he felt like he was keeping her from going on her own way.

Not knowing how he felt about things could be the synapse of this week. To think of everything was an exercise of grounding, and to stare at himself in a mirror was a slippery slope on becoming less and less familiar with the white haired figure that shared his features but felt like a stranger, one that would reach through the mirror and hurt him if it could. The sight didn’t produce tears from his eyes anymore, but it still made him freeze where he was. It still hurt, it would always hurt. 

Would Daud hurt him? He hadn’t given that too much thought. It was irrational to think so, he knew the new Outsider and knew how it was to  _ be _ an Outsider. It was foolish to think that anyone in that place would concern themselves so much with something as mediocre as a single life out of many, with the only goal being to cause harm. It just didn’t work, hate didn’t last long in the Void. Yet, he wasn’t just anyone, he had been the God that Daud had knelt to and prayed for hours on end, without achieving anything for years to come. It was his title - now Daud’s - that he muttered in his lips in praise and in curse.

He might see so much more now, know so much more. But people were volatile, mysterious things, and it was never his forte to predict where they would go. Daud already is an entirely different deity than himself had been. Why not be one that could hold a grudge and like causing harm too? If that had been a genuine mistake, or had not, would it even matter? The boy who had been a God would never know.

All the same, Daud watched him with his black eyes, seeming to focus either on him or in the entirety of the world, it was impossible to tell. Then, he spoke. “I wonder how I never saw it. You’re just like them. Another urchin that somehow pushed through into teenagehood.”

He wasn’t sure whether to take offense on his words or not. There was nothing to be ashamed of in the life he had led before, there wasn’t any indignity in having to scavenge for food, on being wary of a dangerous world, of knowing hunger, cold and pain. The indignity was in the world and the people who permitted kin to live on like that. He had always thought so at least. Then why did he feel ashamed now? 

But Daud did not speak to achieve an offense. He knew the assassin’s intonation at least, even if the man surprised him time and time again. He spoke in a monotone, a bit of gritty discontentment, like a wolf that ached to act instead of wasting his words away. All the same, his voice still sported a bit of warmth, a bit of sympathy, even if the man never would admit to, stubborn as he was.

Daud had a heart much greater than what he gave himself credit for. He could weave mercy in the same grace as the sparrow Empress who had been raised with all the best examples of it. The assassin just had to put a lot more effort than her or Corvo into it, their nature was merciful or protective, Daud’s was inherently violent. He couldn’t find it in himself to blame him for not having the energy to go so often against the current, despite how much he had wanted him to. 

“...You were a lot more talkative as the Outsider.” He commented, criticism covering only faintly the true intent of his words. A question, a concern. He found himself tucking his hands under his own crossed arms, fingers hidden within palms, under his arms, perhaps hidden enough that neither of them would notice it if they shook.

For if they weren’t shaking then, they were soon to start. “Billie is afraid that it will happen again.”

His words didn’t fall on deaf ears. Unlike himself, Daud didn’t bother gesturing or wandering around while he talked and heard. Seated he was on the half wall, seated he remained. The older Outsider would fiddle his fingers often, as if he didn’t know what to do with them but waving them with grace nonetheless. Daud knew exactly where to place his, on the half wall by his sides, and so he remained while his black gaze pinned him down, unblinking and unwavering as he watched. “She isn’t the only one afraid.”

The assassin seemed to not need to see anything about him in his past, his future or his heart to be able to tell how he felt. It must be written in his eyes. Strange how the new Outsider knew what he felt better than himself did, yet, it was unsurprising. He was an experienced human after all. This had been Daud’s trade for decades.

“I did not know. It was not my intention to do you harm.” The new Outsider spoke, making the older God’s heart ache like cold ice within his ribcage. He knew that.

“You don’t need to explain yourself, I should know better.” And he did. Every part of his mind knew that it was illogical to think anything else, for if Daud had wanted to harm him, he would have done so in far more creative ways, and it was rather easy to fail at intervening. There had never been two Outsiders in the world, even if one was only but a former God. This was uncharted territory for both of them, experienced sailors of different vessels. Daud did not not need to explain himself, it was an obvious conclusion.

“Never trust people to know better.” Daud said, and it was not the new Outsider speaking through his lips, no. It was the assassin through and through, the man the once-God had watched mourn many urchins he had taken under his wing because he thought they would know better too. 

He supposed that by now, he should have started to think of Daud as the new Outsider, simply wearing the face of someone he knew once, and start properly being wary of him. But he couldn’t. For all of mankind the Void was unfamiliar and this face was either a stranger’s or a synonym of danger. For all but for himself. Both things in that sight were as familiar as they could be. And he had never known other comforts besides the Void and the presence of his favourites, Daud now managing to be both.

When the new Outsider offered him a gloved hand, he took it. For the former God, gravity wasn’t optional anymore, his body was severely unfit, and he was more than a head shorter than Daud. The firm grip was welcome, so he could join the new Outsider’s seat of choice.

His legs hung from the half wall, ankles bumping against the pale construct. His hands rested against his knees, and he faced the top of the Addermire, with all of Serkonos behind it, framing it in a distance. Pandyssia and Daud now on his right, with the sunset now touching the waterline on his left. “I want things to be different, but I don’t remember asking your help.”

Trust Daud to sound eternally displeased. “It isn’t unwelcome, but I didn’t think you would offer it. I thought you would take this opportunity to turn and never look back. Are you attached?”

He was, of course. To Daud, to the Void, to the only things and methods he knew. Everything else was frighteningly close to the only experience of humanity that he ever had, and it was not something anyone would like to relive. No surprise he was attached. “You sought me out twice of all the people in the world for you to visit. It is not me that looks attached.”

The noise that left the new Outsider was far from graceful, a mix of a hiss and an exasperated huff, perhaps coated by a degree of amusement too, unbridled. He liked that sound, whatever it was. “Billie’s edge is rubbing off on you.” 

“All of you do.” This was a truth he began observing far too often to comfort. In the lack of a proper experience of the world, he saw himself returning every time to the ideas he had of his chosen. A dangerous practice, for while he knew them better than anyone else did, he was also caught off guard by them so often that he shouldn’t feel confident in his skills at presuming what they would have done in his place.

But it wasn’t presumption as much as it was natural. Corvo’s silence came to him without a warning, Billie’s sharpness was as instinctive as breathing. Delilah’s patience kept him going through this week without causing any event worth noticing, and Emily’s kindness kept his tongue shut when he knew what he had to say was not worth it. What he had of Daud, he didn’t know, but there must be something there too, so big in fact that this close up, he couldn’t see it.

They had made him human, quite literally. The new Eyes of the Void continued. “...When you said you would figure this out, I assumed you meant to make a way for you to see the things I might or might not want to show you. You are assuming I will come to you again with things I want you to know.”

“Precisely.” His answer was certain; it was inevitable, really. Daud had said that he wanted to do things differently from the former Outsider, and he did not doubt the newest inhabitant of the Void would do so. But all the same, like the fine arts, one ought to know the rules and concepts in order to break free from them. And to interfere, to manifest anything into the existing world, it was a kind of art and science, just like any other.

Daud would interfere eventually, perhaps far more than himself had. He knew the man enough to know that he wasn’t one to stand idle for long when events took place in the world, and as the Outsider, he wouldn’t be any different. That was the Daud he knew, still when the world changed, but when the right call sounded, he howled back.

“Not only to me, of course.” He added, his eyes leaving the horizon to look to the side and meet the younger deity’s gaze. “Took me a long time to find out how to brand marks on people. How to reach out to them, and differ those already attuned to the Void from those who are not. This is a kind of science, there are methods to it. And I doubt you will want to make the mistakes I have made.”

The new Outsider offered not much of an expression, even less than what he usually would in life. The setting sun didn’t paint him golden like it painted the living, but it didn’t need to. Wherein himself was always pale, gray and blue, Daud seemed undertoned in warm colours regardless of the scenery. Like a vision in a fever dream, in the back of people’s eyes. Earthly and raw, himself came from the depths of the frigid sea, but Daud came from the guts of people’s hearts. 

“You think I will go out marking people as you did?” He asked, and there was no distaste on his tongue, not like it would have been when he was alive. 

“No, I don’t think you will. But when you do, you will be glad to be able to do so at the timing you choose, and with no… Mechanical errors.” What a way to describe it, he mused. To clothe theology and witchcraft into the robes of a kind of science and art was daring on the very least, inherently heretical at best. 

But alas, he supposed he would live as he had always lived. Born under certain stars, an heretical in life, in turning, in Godhood and in life once again. Perhaps he was fated too to die an heretical’s death, at some Overseer’s pyre. Especially now, looking every inch like the image of the continental Pandyssians, whom in the books of the few adventurers that made it back to the Isles described them as rarely dark skinned but always pale eyed, with the presence of albinism in the majority of their observed numbers. 

“Is that what you want to do with your life?” The question was so strange to his ears that it nearly made him lose his balance in the half wall he was seated at. He looked at Daud for a long moment. He heard the question, but it felt as if it was meant for somebody else.

He could do without the tears making his eyes wet, for one. “I want everything and nothing at all.”

Not having a proper answer nor knowing what he genuinely wanted in the long run, unlike his chosen who always seemed to know what they wanted, didn’t make the question any less valuable to him. The former Outsider hoarded it on his chest as if it was a name. It was the validation he didn’t know he needed - to hear for once it being asked what was it that  _ he _ wanted. He couldn’t describe the warmth that bloomed in him, so sudden it made him hold his breath as he relished in it. 

And what he wanted was a mystery even to himself, but he wanted to help Daud. Perhaps not dedicate his entire life to him, although he very well could and it still would feel right to do so, as if that dedication would grant him some sort of forgiveness from spirits that had joined him at the Ritual Hold but were not there anymore. Daud had been one of them. At least a little help to one of them was due. 

“Everything is a lot. One thing at a time. Try thinking as short as next week.” Daud said, raising his head once again to look at the island beyond, and he found himself following his gaze to it. The once-God took a deep breath. He had been thinking of many things, the future a common theme among many of them, but nothing as mundane as  _ next week _ . The question felt short-sighted and foreign to him, almost a mockery. Even so, he thought, if at least to entertain the new God.

“Next week… Well…” Not knowing what to say was another strange feeling. “... Getting out of Addermire would be nice. Perhaps catch a glimpse of the whale I heard singing a couple nights ago. Sort out Billie, if I can.”

“What is the problem with Billie?” The subject was an alleyway without exit, and he wasn’t very proud to have led himself into it and ending up cornered. The hem of his shirt seemed suddenly so interesting, as was watching himself running his nails against the thread that held it together, slowly working on fraying it.

“She must have wishes and plans of her own… I am holding her back. I don’t want to hold her back.” It was obvious, wasn’t it? Billie had never been one to stay put for long, nor should she, with a bounty that large on her head. She had found herself in the Dreadful Wale and he imagined she would be soon enough working to get another ship. She would be already at it if it wasn’t for him.

He couldn’t begin to conceive the reasons why she remained here when she could be out there, working towards the things she wanted. She had no duty towards him, or towards anyone for that matter. He mused whether it was guilt that kept her around, or something else entirely. None of his guesses were much better than the one before, however. “I am not sure how to make her go, she already did enough for me. I appreciate it but she can’t keep me around out of guilt.”

“You don’t know that.” Daud cut him short. “You don’t know why she stays. You don’t know anything that goes on in her head.”

One thing that dawned on him, as he raised his eyes from his hands to find the new Outsider’s gaze pinned on him, was that he was used to hearing pleas and questions, and had spent several lifetimes handing them out. None about what he would do, often about the world around him, but questions were something himself was familiar. He answered, and very rarely asked.

Daud was being the exact opposite. Not entirely unfounded, the man was curious in his own right, had worked intelligence as often as he worked his sword, but even so, now he was littering him with questions he couldn’t make sense of having any use to the new deity. “No, I don’t. Where is this coming from? What are all these questions for?”

As the sun was halfway set on the ocean, with its slow departure, the terrace slowly became darker and the new Outsider’s coat turned progressively into a darker shade of maroon. Less light played on the surface of those dark eyes now, even with them turned to his direction, facing both him and the greater astro. “I’m making them because you don’t seem to be making them yourself. You’re very bad at being human.”

Maybe it should have felt like a blow, but it didn’t. It was the truth after all. He must have looked dumbly surprised, enough for the new Outsider to permit a small noise from himself. A rough huff of air, amused somehow, but not a grin. “You were a very hopeful Outsider, hoping for people to know better and for them to sort things out. You won’t go very far like this.”

Daud was giving him a lesson on being human. He had thought the man had run out of surprises to offer him when his own reign at the Void had ended, but he had never been so far off from the truth. The new deity brought himself from the half wall without much effort, if any at all. He was seated next to him in a moment, and in another, he was standing next to him, offering him his gloved hands to help him down from his spot.

Perhaps he should start accepting he wouldn’t understand this new world he lived in. He wouldn’t understand Billie’s motives for staying by him, as if he meant anything to her when he logically could mean nothing beyond a charge, a weight keeping her from flying off again. He would most definitely never understand Daud, not the man in his entirety, even less the God he had become.

But as he accepted his help and stood once more on his two feet, he couldn’t help but to think not knowing wasn’t so awful _. _ Not great, truly. Existence was tiring and promised to remain tiring until it was over, and it would remain very much a fumble in the dark. But he had good company, so far. Perhaps he could endure not knowing. 

He didn’t require much, no. It had been the only thing he concerned himself with as the Outsider, and would remain his own concern in this new life. To watch his people and be around them, that was his only request. And so far, he was having that need met. There mustn’t be anything else that he could ask out of life. 

“...You’re trying to teach me.” He stated, not a question but a plain fact, as he looked up at the assassin and felt an ache on his neck by doing so. To think, he had enjoyed once looking down at his chosen, and that pleasure hadn’t faded away either in this new life. Maybe there was something he could do about the fact he was now at the height of the deity’s chest.

“Don’t make me regret it. It is just interesting enough.” Daud did not like him, and had always made it known to the former Outsider and the world.. He hated him, even when he sought his attention for decades. Hated him and blamed him for all the evils in the world, including himself, but remained visiting every shrine he came across, his fingers rubbing whalebone whenever he touched it as if he was soothing a bruise himself had placed on them.

Daud hated him, and would let him know of it often. Hated him when offering him courtesy, hated him now too, when he helped him down from the half wall. The assassin must think him an idiot, but he wouldn’t trade the man’s oddness for anything in this world or the Void. “You have a soft spot for urchins.”

Riling him up would never  _ not _ be something entirely delectable to do, to just watch the man’s frown deepen in a hideous scowl, that would have been too serious and menacing for anyone that didn’t have those ears, impossible to ignore once one noticed them there and how dumb they looked. Oh, Daud had stopped being interesting ages ago. But the former God had never figured out how to stop being interested in him. 

“I thought you couldn’t get anymore insufferable.” His words were like blade and gravel, his frown dire, and they tore just the widest grin from the boy who was once a God. “Go talk with Billie.”

“Thank you, Daud.” In all the years that Daud had spent seeking his attention and often getting it in the earliest ones, he didn’t think he had ever heard the assassin thank him for anything. He had never requested it out of the assassin, either. But he handed the assassin these words all the same, meaning every word, and handing it as lightly as a farewell.

They would be immensely different people at each other’s roles, that was one certainty in a sea of none.

Daud left unceremoniously, at a moment he was there, at another, the world was bending at that one spot, pulling back the offending object, the needle that pierced through realms, and granting the new deity a route back to the depths from which he came. He wasn’t sure how often Daud would visit, and if there would even be a third. He didn’t know if the deity’s interest would last until the next decade or until the next week. He was unpredictable, and he couldn’t say that the uncertainty of it all wasn’t a fair punishment at the end of it.

But if he was honest, he could get used to this. He could grow used to Daud’s presence, the comfort of knowing he watched, even if he didn’t bestow him anything, not even a word. He didn’t require gifts, attention, nor the confirmation that he was unique or special, somehow above all others, because he wasn’t. This wasn’t an earning out of pride or vanity. It was a simple truth: like he felt towards all of his marked, he adored the man, down to an unhealthy degree.

With the sun now nearly fully gone into the ocean, he began feeling the cold of the night seeping into him. The stone had cooled quickly, and now the tips of his toes were beginning to ache from touching it. Serkonos could never be properly cold, but in comparison to its days, it was impossible to don’t feel chilly when the night began falling. Specially for him he supposed, with his body being a classic, by-the-book case of malnourishment.

The sight was a lovely one, but he had been given something to do. His feet were quiet as he walked back towards the balconies of the private rooms, counting the doors until he came to the one closest to the office of the Chief Alchemist. It was the cleanest balcony too, and one with a table and chair outdoors. He had left the door ajar, and pushed it without much of a concern for noise. It creaked louder when it opened slowly, so doing it slower wouldn’t remedy the inevitable moan of the hinges.

It stopped midway with a firm, low sound. From behind it, Billie emerged with her Void-given eye, her hand still behind the door. “I was going to search for you. I felt something, something wrong.”

The Silver of the Eye in Billie’s features was older than himself, and carried a familiarity to it that he couldn’t easily name. It wasn’t comfortable, unlike other things that reminded him of the Void, but it isn't inherently hated. The Dead God was an interesting thing, preceding himself and belonging to an entirely different world. He understood it far less than he understood Daud or the Void - one was human, the other was a force of nature, light and dark - and the Dead God was neither of those things.

What he knew was that unlike him, it did not shape a Void for mankind’s perception. It hadn’t needed to. It communed with the dead and the dead alone, and those things remained even after it was gone. His name had been caged through centuries in a language he could not read, same words etched in altars and runes, and it supposedly was a language developed by that same Dead God. That language retained its power, unknown and unreadable by the living, but lived on in darkened corners and whalebone, remnants of its legacy.

Himself was leaving a legacy far more subtle. He was leaving arcane warriors and witches in history, with stories that perhaps would outlive them all. He wasn’t leaving a language behind, but he was leaving mankind with terrors and gifts, like the storms and like the stars; he had doomed Pandyssia but aided a young Empire. An Empire that played music to keep him at bay, but evoked his name at every small inconvenience that plagued the common man.

It was a good legacy, he thought. Different. And Daud would build his own too, also unique, surely, but one nonetheless. 

Under the scrutiny of the Silver of the Eye, he could only but think how it would have been for her if Daud had not taken the Void for himself after the former Outsider was gone. Surely it wouldn’t be a comfortable existence for her, but he had predicted that outcome too. That was exactly why Billie had this arm and eye, and not a mark - if he was gone and the Void was alone, then he would leave to her one last mission. The last of the last of the last. 

“I heard a whale singing.” It wasn't a lie, it had never sat well with him to lie for the people he chose to accompany, a few of them marked but not all. He wasn't sure if her eye permitted her to see that the Void was bleeding into this world in different colours, and if she couldn't see, he wasn't certain if it was meant for her to know that Daud had taken his place.

He wondered how it would make her feel, knowing that Daud,  _ her  _ Daud, father figure and teacher, saviour and doom, was now in the Void, surely watching her every step and wishing her well through it. He would not share that knowledge, not yet at least. He had always liked to keep his secrets, and this would be one of those.

"Did you get to see it?" She asked while he stepped forward, bypassing the half open door and letting Billie close it behind him. The warmth of Serkonos sometimes peppered her features with the small dots of perspiration, but he didn't think this was the case. Did she have nightmares too?

"No." He said, his eyes taking a moment to adjust to the dark room. With her foresight and Silver of the Eye, he had no doubt that the dark offered her no obstacle to see him, not in the way it offered for him. "Billie, why do you stay?"

Curse the black-eyed bastard for getting to him with his words. He had told him to talk to her, and here he was, intending perfectly to follow his suggestion blindly, trustingly. That trust did not feel misplaced - Daud had called him a hopeful God and he might be one indeed, Daud knew him well, and knew of people more than himself did. He hoped Daud would be offering advice with the same intent that he offered to help the new Outsider, out of the guilt and liking in his heart, nothing more and nothing less.

Besides, he was the experienced human out of the two of them. There was nothing quite like the voice of experience. Daud must know better, even if Billie's answer to his question was a stern and questioning frown, as severe as the man that raised her. Wolves always gathered in packs, the Whalers no different, and even distant from him, her nature did not deny her. "Excuse me?"

"Guilt. Pity." He wanted to don't sound accusatory with his words, but he wasn't sure if he achieved it. "A week watching me haunt the Addermire when you could be working towards your next boat or doing anything else your heart wishes, truly. You don’t need to do any of this, but you do it anyway. Why?"

Even in the dark of the room, the glare of her good eye was absolutely lupine, hollow of anything but the inquisition of weakness and motive behind that dark iris. The white of her sclera nearly shone in the dark. He could see so much still, to unveil secrets and hoard them was the one thing he was talented at doing, before, during and after his stay at the Void, but one thing he could not see was what kind of thoughts were running in that head of hers. 

Not knowing made him uncomfortable. Not knowing made him fiddle with the hem of his shirt once again, expression unaltered in his translucent eyes but worry clear in the restlessness of his fingers. Billie stared at him, all of him, as if noticing for the first time his presence there.

"Because I care, boy." She sounded irritated, somehow. As if he was being intentionally stubborn, as if he didn't read what for her was so obvious between the lines. "You cared too, in your own way. We care in weird ways in this kind of life."

"The day it looks like you can do well on your own, you can ask me to let you be. Until then, just get used to it. I will go where you want to go." He searched for uncertainty in her eyes, for any fragility in her resolve that he could prod and investigate. But there was none.

She meant what she said, and her words were final. There was no end to the mysteries of this world for him, he supposed. The 'why' she cared, why she kept stretching that care for him, it remained and perhaps would always remain unknown. It was as if he had asked for her to return the favour when he cared for the outcome of his chosen, for any of them in fact. He had not. Had never expected it, asked or demanded. Yet, here she was, here Daud was, forgoing any expectations, paving their way onwards with only but their hearts and that inner compass of theirs that seemed to point to the direction they wanted to go, even if they were not fully aware of it.

He was thankful for the darkness, for it might conceal whatever expression might have taken over his features from hearing her. He wasn't used to this, to having his wishes asked, having people willing to follow him wherever his nonexistent will decided to lead him to. "Does it ever stop feeling weird being asked what I want to do?"

It was a genuine question, but it must have sounded off. Broken, somehow. He didn't detect it, nor diagnosed that faulty tone, even less it's reason. But Billie did, of course. It came as no surprise anymore that these people knew how he felt more than he did. He didn't see her coming until he felt her arms around him, thick and warm, muscle pressing where his vertebrae stood out against his back, and he could only but squirm his arms under her own to hold her right back. 

Four thousand years locked away in the Void and he hadn’t imagined what he had been missing in this. The kindness of a fleeting touch, the suffocating warmth of Billie's hugs. Billie was not one for hugs, it was an observable truth. She hadn't received those enough in her life, nor longed for it. But it was as if she had seen it once and it had been cemented in her mind as  _ the right way. _ And she chose deliberately to handle him in the right way.

He was not complaining, not at all. "No. Nothing ever stops being weird, you just get used to it."

The once-God wouldn't mind getting used to this, he thought. This way in which Billie seemed to have dragged him under her wing like she had been shielded once. She wasn't part of the conversation between an Outsider and the former Outsider, but she seemed to be into their promise as well. She was doing it differently too, paving her own way and her own method on filling the blanks another left. As he tucked his face against her shoulder, he could only think that yes, he wouldn't mind getting used to this at all.

"...What is it that you want to do?" Billie eventually spoke, not moving but letting him cling to her comfortably. The dark rendered him nearly blind anyway, he saw no use in keeping his eyes open. 

"I want to go to Stilton's." He muttered, letting his fingers lace themselves on Billie's back, ceasing their restlessness. "A hood would be appreciated too."

Billie let out a small laugh at that, something he felt more than heard, the noise a deep rumble that trembled on her shoulder. "Is that all? You might want to include a shave on that list."

Her statement made him open his eyes. A shave? He had never considered… How old was he when he was sacrificed to the Void? Sixteen at best, and even then he had never been capable of growing a proper beard, one of the side effects of malnourishment. He didn't think that would have changed in such a short notice, his condition hadn't improved, far from it in fact. 

He moved back a little from her hold, raising his head as he ran his fingers through his jaw. He felt nothing, but it might not mean it wasn't there - fine hairs were a possibility after all. "Really?"

Billie let go of him entirely, a hearty laugh breaking through her lips as she walked to the dresser of the room. Electricity hadn't been restored to the private rooms, and a few candles and lamps were the source of light in the evenings. The former assassin turned a lamp on, the light blinding his sensitive eyes for a moment.

"No. But this reaction was worth everything." She said, her grin evident now that the room was bright enough that he could see it. "Please take your time growing up."

He had a feeling that he could feel Daud laughing just below the surface of this world, the bastard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This could have been 2 chapters easily, but I never figured out how to break it. I just could let Daud and the boy go on forever and wouldn't have minded it in the slightest. I promise to put more effort in being more brief, however, I care about you all.
> 
> Thanks to spider_fingers, polyx3ne and RandomFranBowFan for joining the kudos gang, making it a total of 12 kudos by the time I am posting this. Special thanks to SANJOH and VIVIENE for bookmarking, may this chapter find you in a good time, and leave a comment if you can! I love feedback, and I love hearing what people think of the stuff I write.


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